Clash of Clans: The Ultimate Guide To Managing Mini Accounts
People are shocked to hear I have 16 advanced accounts. It takes less time than you might imagine, if you use your time efficiently.
Table of Contents:
(i) Why Make Mini Accounts? (ii) Options For Developing Your Mini (iii) Maximizing Utility Per Player Minute (iv) Are Minis Right For You? How many? (v) Conclusion
(i) Why Make Mini Accounts?
There are several reasons I can think of why a person might want to make mini accounts. Here they are in no particular order:
- The timers on play time are annoying and you want to have enough accounts always to have an army ready to go without buying gems.
- You want to be able to donate a lot for your clan and still use your army for attacks and save up resources for upgrades with your main.
- You want to donate to yourself reliably, correctly, and in a timely fashion.
4. You want to explore different upgrade paths with each account, allowing you to unlock twice as many max level troops in a given span of time. For instance, upgrade ground with one account and air with another to have both in the time of just one.
5. You want extra accounts to facilitate clan leadership functions by: - donating rapidly and diversely, - writing multi-part announcements, - improving odds of clan games completion, - guaranteeing exactly a multiple of 5 accounts ready for war, - guaranteeing extra clan-leader-skill-level attacks, - demonstrating attacks at lower TH levels for lower members.
6. You plan to leave an account at a lower TH level because you enjoy the meta game there but you also wanted to advance.
7. It’s just fun to build another base from scratch, when the timers are all low and every new upgrade feels substantial! 2 week timers for a very marginal improvement have their charm, but the thrill of the early game can only be found in the early game.
8. It feels better getting the loot from daily bonuses more times, even if it doesn’t actually contribute to your account maximizing. I play for the feelings, not the digital progress!
9. Whatever, I don’t know. Why do you want a mini?
(ii) Options For Developing Your Mini
I was going to give this a section in this guide, but it kind of became its own article. And then also these articles have related information as well. Here’s a quick summary:
Depending on what your clan needs, you may want to upgrade in each of the following patterns:
- Capped out everything at each TH
- Capped out army capacity, plus key troop and spell upgrades
- Capped out cheap things for raiding
- Rushed popular troop requests to 1–2 levels lower than max
- Specifically engineered for a specific place in a specific war line-up
- Not quite so specific, but the same as above!
- Rushed TH12 for siege donation, or w/e
- Nothing in particular, just making another account
(iii) Maximizing Utility Per Player Minute
So, if you run enough minis or have too much real-life demand on your time, you will get to the point where your playing time is actually the most limiting factor. I reached that point several minis ago.
Upgrading a base takes a lot of calendar time, but that amount is reduced the more player time you invest. However, the first few minutes every day are worth much more than the rest.
Now, of course, if I were to use an army designed for looting, or used some DE troops, I could probably net more than 100k elixir during each fight, so these graphs are a little bit exaggeratedly low. However, the general idea is the same: dramatically diminishing returns per minute of time invested in bursts.
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So, if you have limits on gaming time, but want your mini advanced quickly, it is worth considering how much advancement you get for your account per minute of time you spend playing it. In other words, limiting the “grind” as much as possible. This flips “base maxing” optimization advice along an unexpected axis, so you’ll have to forget most of what you know about limiting calendar time to max while we talk about limiting player time to max instead, with calendar time as a secondary objective.
Put simply, you can collect 2–3 attacks worth of loot from collectors just from logging in without attacking, and then your first two attacks receive an average star bonus boost, and war battles provide bonus loot per attack as well.
The most attacks you’ll need in a day to take advantage of all of these boosted sources of loot is four, which can be done back-to-back in two sufficiently-spaced log-ins, in the space of 10 minutes per day per account.
Okay, a few quick notes:
- we must acknowledge that getting a win for war battles may take more planning and execution time than regular looting, especially if you find a ghost town really early in your search.
- The number of minutes invested for a war win is actually higher than the number of minutes for looting. Therefore, the first graph with no war actually probably could be pulled off in 3 minutes per account per day, whereas the war ones probably require 10 minutes per day at least on war days, for pretty marginally improved loot gains.
- Clan War League loot and medal bonuses make it by far the best time to spend one attack per day!
- Clan Games are not included in this measure anywhere because, depending on your clan, perhaps completing a single event would qualify you for the full set of rewards. On the other hand, perhaps earning 4k would only get you the first tier. It’s complex to graph meaningfully.
- Monthly rewards are easily unlocked with 2 attacks per day, and are very small in loot terms. Not worth considering.
Okay, so how much loot do you need per day really to keep your workers busy? It really depends on what level you are. At TH6, you need about 500k gold per builder day of business (pronounced busy-ness). That scales up each level until TH13, where you need about 1,000,000 gold per builder day of business.
Oh, hey, gold? Oh gee.
Logging in twice per day for 1 attack each time (3 minutes daily) should easily produce 3 million gold per day on average over the month, taking into account the season bank.
Throw in CWL and that can easily be another 7 million gold plus medals for the month, or about 250k per day + medals.
Throw in regular wars, and that’s potentially another 500k every day depending on your win percentage.
So, just using regular attacks and wars, you can often have enough gold to keep an average 3.75 builders working throughout each month, even at TH13. It just so happens that 3.5 builders is the ratio you need to max out in as little calendar time as possible!
Ultimately, we are talking about probably 3–5 minutes per day for 80% full speed maxing, or probably 10–15 minutes per day for actual full* speed account maxing.
5 minutes x 16 accounts = two 40 minute blocks per day to max 16 accounts almost at full speed.
Warning: This doesn’t take dark elixir into account. The only way to farm DE is to do a lot of attacks, which takes a lot of player time. Sorry. Heroes take years to do this way, even using medals for hammers. My heroes are lame.
Warning 2*: This counts “maxing” by lab completion, which takes more calendar days if your builders are all engaged. If you count based on building completion only, then this is only about half of full speed.
Warning 3: You have to be really efficient, and typically force-close the program to speed up attacks you’re finished with, to get these extremely low times of 3 minutes per account per day. It will probably take a bit of practice to achieve.
(iv) Are Minis Right For You? How many?
Again, it takes about 5 minutes a day really to take full advantage of the available gains before diminishing returns set in. Is that going to be worth it for you? This question depends on a few things. What are you using them for? Just one or two are enough to cover donations for most clans.
4 minis is enough to guarantee everyone can war up to 30v30. After 30v30, you would need 9 minis to guarantee it for 31–35 and 41–45. Very marginal clan leader gains after the 4th mini.
9 minis is also enough that you can get an infinite cycle of attacks going through them one after the other without needing any training boosts.
4 minis is enough to run your own 5v5 and build a clan level from scratch before anybody joins.
12 minis is enough that you can complete clan games without any help, although if you’re lucky and average 150 points per attack, that will probably mean about 50 attacks per day.
14 minis is enough to run your own CWL without anyone else in the clan.
Again, it takes about 5 minutes a day really to take full advantage of the available gains before diminishing returns set in. Likely 10–15 minutes per war day for the full war bonuses if you don’t sacrifice regular looting.
However, you don’t actually need to get every bonus all the time with all of them. In my case, there are about 8 that I actually use for any attacks other than war, and many of those I only use once every couple of days. Several stay pretty much frozen where they are and take no additional maintenance. Some I leave out of war unless we needed fillers.
The more you’ve got, the more you can use in a burst when you want them, but you don’t need to use all of them all the time. If you start them upgrading some now, you can easily have the collectors max out TH7 for them in a few months, without your ever attacking (1 minute per day).
(v) Conclusion
Mini accounts take a lot less time than you’d expect. Most of the time in this game is actually spent waiting, so if you just stack multiple waits together, you can get a lot more done per minute waited.
Additionally, the game designers very intentionally set it up so that you get a huge reward for your first few minutes playing each day, to encourage you to build a habit of playing daily.
If you are embracing this habit, then you can accept that it means you get very reduced bonuses for continuing to play beyond those first few minutes with each account. If you use multiple accounts, you can get a lot more bonuses per day, although spread over more accounts. As discussed, however, there are benefits to having multiple accounts, although those also have diminishing returns!
Ultimately, it takes so little time to make a mini account and level it up at a rate of 3 builders working all the time that it’s probably worth it for most players. I recommend it for anyone except players who don’t even have time to get the daily bonuses with their main.
I hope you found enlightening this analysis and guide for managing mini accounts efficiently! I find that I enjoy this game much more because of the mini account dynamics, and I hope you will find similar enjoyment. If you would like to see more of my thoughts and calculations for this game, check out and follow Mr. Way’s School of Clash!
Want to chat with me and/or others about the game? Join our discord! You do not need to join one of our clans, but we welcome you to!
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